Quinn Emanuel Reloads Against Banks in New Price-Fixing Case
Fresh off a favorable ruling in a lawsuit accusing big banks of conspiring to fix credit default swaps, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan has launched a new multibillion- dollar antitrust suit against the banks, this time over interest rate swaps.
The firm filed a class action complaint Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, asserting that 13 major banks and broker ICAP plc conspired to fix the so-called ISDAfix rate. The firm seeks to represent everyone that entered into an interest rate derivative transaction in the eight-year period from Jan. 1, 2006, to January 2014, a group that mostly includes hedge funds, pension funds and other large investors.
The defendants include Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs & Co. Trillions of dollars of financial instruments were affected by the banks' collusion, the complaint asserts.
Quinn Emanuel partner Daniel Brockett, who is also directing the credit default swaps class action, is spearheading the case. In contrast to the CDS case, where Quinn Emanuel battled for the lead counsel role with plaintiffs firms, this time the firm has partnered from the start with two of its competitors. Named plaintiff Alaska Electrical Pension Fund is also represented by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd and Scott + Scott. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman.
ISDAfix is among the most important benchmarks in the U.S. financial system, according to the complaint. It's used to set rates not only for "plain vanilla" interest rate swaps, but also for commercial real estate mortgages, structured debt products and also more esoteric financial instruments such as "steepeners" and "snowballs." Many of these products—like interest rate "swaptions," which are options to do interest rate swaps—may not be widely known, but there's a huge market for them. Swaptions alone involved $29.5 trillion in interest rate swaps as of July 2013.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is reportedly investigating the ISDAfix market but has not yet taken action. The pension fund plaintiff commissioned its own experts to study swings in ISDAfix rates and found anomalous spikes that could only be explained by collusion, the complaint states.
The plaintiffs have asked for an equitable tolling of the statutes of limitation because the defendants concealed their activity.
Several of the defendant banks declined to comment to Bloomberg News.
In the unrelated credit default swap antitrust case, which targets a nearly identical group of banks, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote on Thursday refused to dismiss claims that the defendants violated state unjust enrichment laws and Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Pearson, Simon & Warshaw is colead counsel with Quinn Emanuel in that case.
Read more: http://www.litigationdaily.com/id=1202669162024/Quinn-Emanuel-Reloads-Against-Banks-in-New-PriceFixing-Case#ixzz3CoZDOwpU
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento